Citizen Journalism, Live From Disney World

If you want to understand how citizen journalists armed with cellphones are going to change the world–and create challenges and opportunities for businesses–spend a few minutes at Twisney.com.

What you’ll find there: Live updates from ordinary people walking around Disney World, using their cellphones to share their experiences with anyone who cares to take notice.

As journalism goes, it’s not the Watergate break-in, or even liveblogging from a campaign event. But for some people it is, as the saying goes, news you can use–and that makes it an idea worth understanding.

Here’s how Twisney works. If a theme-park guest wandering around Disney World wants to share something with the Twisney audience, they can send a short email to an address supplied by Twisney. Short really means short: Twisney will only pick up the text from the email’s subject line, ignoring the body of the email. Contributors can also send photos from their cellphones.

You can read these live missives in a couple of ways. One is to visit Twisney’s Web site, where the messages appear overlaid on an aerial view of the Walt Disney World parks on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth map. (Twisney contributors can include a few words about their location–“Pirates of the Caribbean,” say–in their message, and the site automatically places the post on the appropriate part of the map.) If your cellphone offers Web access, you can call up the Twisney page while on the go at the parks.

Twisney is even simpler for those who already use the popular Twitter service, which gives its users a simple way to send “microblogging” updates from cellphones. It’s easy to send a cellphone text message to Twitter and have it routed to the Twisney feed. (Likewise, you can also follow the updates via Twitter.)

Twisney isn’t the product of Walt Disney Co. or a venture-capital incubator. It was created by a 34-year-old Disney fan and father of two in his spare time away from his day job as a software developer. Scott Mitchell says he decided to set up Twisney recently because he and a fellow dad were taking their sons on a “guys only” visit to Disney World. Mr. Mitchell wanted a way to update his wife and daughter back at home.

“I thought, how neat would it be to take pictures on my cellphone and shoot them to my wife so she could see what we were doing,” Mr. Mitchell says.

At first, knowledge of Twisney remained within a small circle of friends and family. Then in the past few weeks, word started getting around, and now visits to the site number in the hundreds rather the dozens. As the fan sites devoted to Disney theme parks take notice, those numbers are sure to rise.

Right now, the updates posted to Twisney are something of a mish-mash, the contributions of some early adopters trying out the system. Some simply want to share their experiences, such as the contributor who wrote, “Enjoying a Dole Whip in Adventureland right outside of the Tiki Room” last weekend. Others are sending photos.

And that’s where the real potential of Twisney–and countless other micro-news sites that haven’t yet been created–rests. The next logical step for Twisney is to have users consistently share real-time intelligence throughout the parks. How many people would tune in for messages like “No line at Space Mountain right now”?

For Disney and other companies that see such services evolve, there’s a potentially valuable opportunity to encourage passionate customers and even participate directly in the electronic conversation. But there are headaches looming as well–such as when the in-the-know park customers converge in one place after reading that “No line at Space Mountain” message.

The broader lesson is that the effort involved in participating in citizen journalism is getting smaller. That’s going to increase the ranks of those participating–even if they don’t consider themselves journalists.

Comments (5 of 5)

journalism rocks! I love the fact that people are taking a more active role in reporting fair and balanced news and content.

We do the same thing on our Disney website http://www.lobebugcentral.com
The offical website for all things Herbie the Love Bug. http://www.lovebugcentral.com is the place to share your Herbie Movie information!Post your reviews and discuss topics related to those great Herbie the Love Bug movies.